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Month: July 2017

So, I reached a milestone without ever blogging about it: I ‘perfected’ the desktop version of my software.

Note the quotes. Obviously, there’s a lot more it could do, and the interface couldbe a little less clunky (you can tell I just tacked things on as I made them), but the software does what I wanted it to do when I started writing it: It creates PDFs of vocabulary workhsheets for English learners, entirely using hand-made material, but re-using material that’s been used before.

In fact, someone had the idea to add crosswords and wordsearches, and that wasn’t difficult at all. In addition, it will make a nice, alphabetized vocabulary list for the vocab a group has learned.

Arguably, it does more than I had intended for it to do when I got started. And that can only mean one thing:

It’s time to do the django. Since I got about halfway into the desktop version, I realized that it made more sense as a service than anything else, and that the web was the right vehicle for distribution. Imagine if material that I made for my classes could be used in other classes. Imagine if material that my friends and colleagues create for their classes could be leveraged in my classes?

The goal, pure and simple: make it seem like I’m working harder for my students than I am. And the web is the way to do that.

So, I’ve started trying to create a web interface using django. And I’ve been mostly successful. It seems as though very little that I wrote for tkinter can be directly ported without extensive re-writing, but, since I already know how it ‘works,’ I don’t have to figure out how to do it, I just have to adjust it.

Right now, a lot of basic functions have been taken care of, and I have to do a lot of the ‘filler’ work that isn’t so much difficult as… plentiful.

So, look for me to write a bit more about that as time progresses. As well as my insecurities as I go from the pride of working with software that I created myself, to the insecurity of asking my friends to take my software for a spin.